1970 Mercury Cougar - Perfect Storm

An amazing confluence of events—a perfect storm—combined to leave the muscle car hobby with a Boss 302 Cougar Eliminator, vintage 1970, fitted with a Super Drag-Pak option and appearing here as the lowest-mileage known example of its type in the world. Mercury assembled five Super Drag-Pak Boss 302 Eliminators with four-speed transmissions for the 1970 model year.

If you are like me, you are wondering what a Super Drag-Pak is. Every Ford enthusiast has heard of Ford’s Drag-Pak. There is a Super Cobra Jet, but Super Drag-Pak? Is this term for real?

I was taking pictures at Bob Perkins Restoration in Juneau, Wisconsin. Perkins, known as The Big Boss Man for his collection of low-mileage Boss Mustangs and N.O.S. parts, had just finished detailing this Cougar for the new owner, Wayne Schmeeckle of Fort Morgan, Colorado.

2/8The Boss 302 engine was bred for road racing and high-rpm operation. The 302 Boss still saw plenty of action on the dragstrip, and thus the Drag-Pak makes sense.

Most collectors think ’69-’70 Mustang when they hear “Boss 302.” Of course, it’s no secret that Mercury built a Boss 302 in the Cougar line for 1969 and 1970. What is controversial is Drag-Pak and Super Drag-Pak as applied to Boss 302s. Basically, there was no such thing. Or was there?

This car came with a Lois Eminger invoice, which resembles a window sticker. Eminger worked for Ford and saved untold numbers of new car invoices from the ’60s and ’70s that Ford was going to destroy. These invoices contain the itemized wholesale and retail costs of the vehicle and options. The Eminger invoice for this Cougar reveals the Super Drag-Pak retailed for $207.30. Wholesale price was $163.94. The Eliminator package sold for a mere $129.60 retail and $102.46 wholesale.

3/8The Lois Eminger invoice that came with the Cougar helps establish its provenance, as did a Marti Report pulled on the car. Note the Super Drag-Pak option as well as the rear spoiler delete note.

The presence of the Super Drag-Pak on the Ford invoice piqued my interest. I wanted to investigate Boss 302 Drag-Paks and Super Drag-Paks. In the process, I could take pictures and write copy on a Mercury that is most likely the lowest-mileage original-paint, Super Drag-Pak Boss 302 Eliminator in the world.

Wayne considered this Boss 302 Eliminator a significant addition to his collection. He owns about 50 muscle cars from the ’67-’71 model years. “The Eliminator was the best of the Mercury world,” he said. “You can find a lot of these cars restored, but this Eliminator has original paint and great paperwork.”

The fact that this low-mileage original was a real Super Drag-Pak Boss 302 Eliminator added to this Mercury as an important car in the hobby.

To help explore the Cougar’s provenance, Wayne got me in touch with the man he bought the car from, a Mr. Kurt Artinger from Belleville, Illinois. I hoped he was the original owner. He bought the car in 2010.

“I had taken my Super Bee to a local shop,” said Kurt. “The transmission was out. The guy at the shop told me about a Boss Cougar on the way to his shop.”

4/8The interior was extremely sporty for its time, featuring flat gauges laid out across a flat panel, easily visible through the two-spoke steering wheel. A rally clock on the instrument panel just in front of the driver featured a sweep second-hand and e.t. indicator.

Kurt already owned a couple of muscle cars: a 440 Six Pack Bee and a 428 Cobra Jet Mustang. He’s a collector. So, the Cougar really intrigued him, especially when he found out the car was in an estate and would soon be sold. He wanted to buy the Mercury, but the man handling the estate did not know how valuable this car was.

The original owner had passed away at an early age, somewhere around 20 years earlier, and left the car to his older brother. The older brother didn’t drive the car much or perhaps not at all. The last tags on the car dated to 1988.

The car had not been touched in forever

In 2010, the older brother passed, and now the car was for sale in his estate. Negotiations dragged on for six months, but Kurt finally bought the Cougar. Kurt said, “The car had not been touched in . . . gosh, forever. There was something like a heavy film on the body. You couldn’t really tell if the paint was going to be any good or not. And the engine hadn’t turned [over], so they had put some Deep Creep in the cylinders and were getting ready to start it. I contacted the guy and told him I’d be more interested in buying it just as it is.”

Kurt said he “took the gas tank out, took the master cylinder out, bled the brakes, took out the radiator and had it flushed, had the carburetor rebuilt, and continued with the Deep Creep in the cylinders.”

The inside of the engine appeared to have no rust or issues. With a fresh battery, the 302 Boss fired up after “just a five second crank.”

Kurt spent 80 hours hand-buffing the paint and soon was looking at what appeared to him to be “a gem.”

He networked with other Cougar owners. He found several Boss 302 Cougars with original paint, but those low-mileage Cougars had three times the 20,000 miles on this Cougar’s clock. Kurt felt he had the most original Cougar Boss 302 Eliminator of all, and his Cougar was a Super Drag-Pak “without a speck of rust.”

Kurt put a mere 240 miles on the odometer and described the ride as “like a brand-new car.” Fearful that more driving would diminish the car’s originality, he decided to sell his rare Eliminator to a collector. Wayne was the happy recipient.

5/8Notice the W on the certification label attached to the inside edge of the driver’s door. W decodes as the 4.30 Detroit Locker rear axle.

Before adding the Merc to his collection, Wayne engaged Bob Perkins to check over the Eliminator. Perkins installed a battery, cleaned the paint with a hand glaze, and changed the spark plug wires to correct ones, drawing from his treasure trove of N.O.S. parts.

The radiator hoses did not need to be replaced. They were still serviceable and in good condition.

“You’ve got to shoot this car,” Perkins told me. I got the impression he felt the Cougar was so historically significant it should be featured in MCR. Perkins is the head national judge for the Mustang Club of America as well as the one of the leading restorers in the world of vintage Mustangs, with an emphasis on ’69-’71 Boss Mustangs.

I realized the importance of this Cougar over and above the Boss 302 option and the Eliminator package. I needed more facts about the term Super Drag-Pak. Perkins kept his explanation simple: “See, in the Cougar world, a 3.91 is a Drag-Pak, and a 4.30 is a Super Drag-Pak.”

6/8

Kurt spent 80 hours hand-buffing the paint

Basically, he felt the difference between Mercury and Ford was one of marketing terminology. I wanted to know, then, if any Boss 302 Mustang was ever called, by Ford, a Drag-Pak.

“Not according to the window sticker,” Perkins said.

However, a Boss 302 Mustang with a 4.30 gearset also had an engine oil cooler, same as the Super Drag-Pak Cougars. Mechanically, then, there was no difference from the Mustang Boss 302 to the Cougar Boss 302.

But there is controversy among Boss 302 Mustang enthusiasts about the Drag-Pak name. So it was very interesting when Perkins said, “Internal Ford memos refer to the 300 engine code as a Drag-Pak.”

What’s the 300 engine code? The “300” is stamped into the engine coil tag on 4.30-geared Boss 302 Mustangs.

To back up his Super Drag-Pak claim, Perkins has a photocopy of the 1970 Build Sheet Decoder book, published by Ford. Next to the “300” engine code the book reads “Drag-Pak.” The caveat is that very few people have a copy of this factory reference.

8/8The taillight board lit up like a Shelby Mustang and featured sequential turn signal lights.

The factory build sheet and the Eminger factory invoice reveal the high-performance truth. Mercury did offer a Super Drag-Pak option on its Boss 302 Cougar Eliminator. Analyzing the build sheet reveals the owner opted to delete the rear spoiler from the decklid.

How rare is this Mercury? A Marti Report reveals that dealers ordered 2,267 ’70 Cougars with the Eliminator package. Exactly 469 of those came with the Boss 302 engine, of which 323 had a four-speed manual transmission. A mere 5 of those four-speed Boss 302 Eliminators had the Super Drag-Pak option.

We have to believe most of those Super Drag-Pak Mercurys got hot-rodded and drag-raced to an untimely detour to the local salvage yard. An exception is this central Ohio Super Drag-Pak Boss 302 Eliminator. For some reason, this Boss Cougar stayed rust-free in barn storage for the last couple of decades. It was a perfect storm.